A funny idea I had once was that after the revolution, the new government gets a 100 page blank notebook to write the laws in.

Once they fill up the last page, all of them are executed.

The next group of guys gets a 100 page blank book.

Have you tried using Windows XP on a touch device?

You know, you're right. Nobody should ever try anything new with voice interaction. We should leave that shit off because its buggy or only knows how to do web searches based on bad guesses.

We shouldn't spend any time putting this stuff in front of users and learning what works well, what doesn't work, what people like, what they don't like. God forbid we try and see if there are ways to integrate it with how people currently use computers.

Instead, what we should do is wait until the 23rd century, when we have starships. Even though we've done no incremental work between now and then, in the distant future, voice recognition and natural language processing is just going to be really, really good, because The Future. It's just going to build itself, and when we are bald and say "COMPUTER" to our starship, its going to listen and then do exactly the right thing, and nobody is going to ask why the bridge has so many buttons and levers and consoles and shit if there is a ship-wide computer with unlimited power and perfect human voice recognition. And we're going to gloss right over how a near-Ai level of natural language understanding still needs us to say COMPUTER first before it figure out who we're talking to, as if anyone else on the bridge could execute the command we're asking when we're staring off into nowhere instead of at another human in the same room...

Anyway, I'm running 9926 on two machines - neither of which are touch-enabled. I've never talked to the thing yet. It appears to run faster than 8.0/8.1. The start menu behavior is better, and you can flip back and forth between little-menu-on-desktop or "big screen of metro" with a simple gesture.

The UI feels positively snappy. The paradigm has been reversed entirely from 8 - now, metro apps run on your desktop - instead of your desktop is some weird bad neighborhood nobody wants you to go to.

I think a lot of people will like Windows 10.

Primarily? Because it won't pass the testing without a lot of work. In particular, there are negative assertion tests on header files (some things are not allowed to be dragged into the namespace, and the header are promiscuous). There's also a whole bunch of testing having to do with full and almost-full devices. There are also signal issues and process group membership issues. For example, you can "escape" an exclusion group on Linux by setting your default group to one of your other groups; Linux overwrites the membership in cr_groups[0] as a synonym for cr_gid, and doesn't handle POSIX saved IDs quite right, either (Neither do the BSDs, so this isn't a Linux-only problem).

Last time I attempted to run the test suit on Linux as a lark, there were about 20K failures (mostly tests not compiling because of it bailing out over the header file issues. There are also some parts of the system that have been subsumed by systemd; this isn't intrinsically a problem on its own, so long as the system *also* supports flat config files as an addendum, at least for some aspects of logging.

Also, getting the UUCP to work over USB serial dongles is likely to be something of a bear, unless you make the HDB modifications for handling the "rung indicate" as a notification to take the shared file lock on the callout device so the getty's don't start trying to chat with each other.

Finally, there some considerable legal/licensing issues for the trademark.

I was expecting this to be about slashdot.

Opportunity costs.

Don't forget we feed the world. Agriculture and Intellectual Property are still a good chunk of the economy. Even with silicon valley and hollywood, agriculture is the biggest part of our economy here in California. Not manufacturing, perhaps, but also not service.

I'd suggest it all started going downhill when the courts reclassified News as Infotainment, and stated that it didn't have to be true.

"Long Island is an island in the U.S. state of New York. Stretching northeast from New York Harbor into the Atlantic Ocean, the island comprises four counties, including two (Kings and Queens) that form the New York City boroughs of Brooklyn and Queens, and two (Nassau and Suffolk) that are farther out on the island and mainly suburban. Although all four counties are part of the greater New York metropolitan area,[2] the name "Long Island" is often reserved in popular usage for only Nassau and Suffolk counties, as distinct from those lying within New York City proper. North of the island is Long Island Sound, across which are the states of Connecticut and Rhode Island." -Wikipedia

How can anyone think this is insightful? Monster Storm! Better safe than sorry! Oh, well then we should do the same for a totally different scenario not involving as much risk. Insightful?

Right. But the monster storm is. The point being there is a monster storm.

The severity of the storm is related to the heating of the ocean, which is due to global warming. It is a monster, but the monster stumbled and didn't go quite where they thought.

Seemed as though you were saying that modern editors made up for the difficulties, so it was OK for languages to suck. In what way does that reflect "the right tool for the job"? Seems like its more in the lines of "if you want to use a double-bladed axe as a hammer, wear gloves".

Solar sail can achieve 25% light speed, according to NASA, and Alpha Centauri is 4 light years away.

You want a manned mission (with robots doing all the actual work) to determine if the conventional wisdom that a manned mission to the outer planets is physically impossible is correct. Even if the pilot dies, you learn the furthest a manned mission can reach. There's seven billion people, you can afford to expend one or two. Ideally, they'd be volunteers and there'll be no shortage of them, but if you're concerned about valuable life, send members of the Tea Party.

No big surprise. The military are willing to invest what it takes for what they need. Military entities are, by necessity, pitifully naive when it comes to anything useful, but once they specify what they think they want, they don't shirk at the cost, they get the job done. A pointless job, perhaps, but nonetheless a completed job.

The corporate sector wants money. Things don't ever have to get done, the interest on monies paid is good enough and there hasn't been meaningful competition in living memory. Because one size never fits all, it's not clear competition is even what you want. Economic theory says it isn't.

The only other sector, as I have said many times before, that is remotely in the space race is the hobbyist/open source community. In other words, the background behind virtually all the X-Prize contestants, the background behind the modern waverider era, the background that the next generation of space enthusiasts will come from (Kerbel Space Program and Elite: Dangerous will have a similar effect on the next generation of scientists and engineers as Star Trek the old series and Doctor Who did in the 1960s, except this time it's hands-on).

I never thought the private sector would do bugger all, it's not in their blood. They're incapable of innovation on this kind of scale. It's not clear they're capable of innovation at all, all the major progress is bought or stolen from researchers and inventors.

No, with civilian government essentially walking away, there's only two players in the field and whilst the hobbyists might be able to crowdsource a launch technology, it'll be a long time before they get to space themselves. The military won't get there at all, nobody to fight, so the hobbyists will still be first with manned space missions, but it's going to take 40-50 years at best.

We have the technology today to get a manned mission to Alpha Centauri and back. It would take 15-20 years for the journey and the probability of survival is poor, but we could do it. By my calculations, it would take 12 years to build the components and assemble them in space. Only a little longer than it took for America to get the means to go to the moon and back. We could actually have hand-held camera photos taken in another solar system and chunks of rocky debris from the asteroid belt there back on Earth before Mars One launches its first rocket AND before crowdfunded space missions break the atmosphere.

All it takes is putting personal egos and right wing politics on the shelf, locking the cupboard and then lowering it into an abandoned mineshaft, which should then be sealed with concrete.